Howdy.
Like everyone else I was amazed by SoaSE's scope and visual richness; during the first week of owning the game I played it for hours on end. Here, I thought, is a worthy successor to Galactic Civilisations.
These thoughts turned out be premature, however. As it turns out, since my first week of owning the game, I haven't played it at all. I've learned the mechanics, and despite the lush graphics and higher difficulty levels, I find there is nothing in the game to keep going back for.
I suppose SoaSE could never be as involved as a turn-based 4X game; it offers precious little in return for this cost in depth though. The ships choices are all rather limited, doubly so since all three races have numbingly little variance in their ships. In this day and age of StarCraft and Dawn of War I've come to expect game races with very different technologies and styles of play. In SoaSE, however, even the capital ships are pretty much cast in five moulds. Maybe it's just me, but I found this terribly disappointing. Ditto for structures. Tech trees differ, yeah; but they have no great influence on the game until late-game, when there's no point in having such tech anyway. All your technologies do is improve existing paradigms: make more money, do more damage, mine more minerals... at some point, while playing the game, I just realised that there was nothing left to try or discover.
Did I miss something? On my game box it proudly says "No. 1 Smash Hit in the US Charts," and it looks like many people are getting a lot of mileage out of this game... but I just don't see it.
J.
